Sunday, April 4, 2010

It's here! After the always excruciatingly long wait, real baseball is back. And what better way to kick it off than with the Yankees and Red Sox dueling at Fenway. Slated to toe the slab are CC Sabathia for the defending World Champions and Josh Beckett for the Sawx. As is typically my wont for these things, I have prepared a PITCHf/x profile (mostly numbers, since there's not a whole lot for me to say) for these two aces so we can get a quick look at their stuff before heading into the season. I'll start with Sabathia.

CC SABATHIA

The big man from California had an extremely successful first season in the Bronx, winning 19 games in the regular season and adding two gems in ALCS against the Angels. If you're a hard throwing lefty that can keep the ball in the strikezone, you've got an inside track to success in the big leagues. Here are the splits from 2009.

Pitch Data

Average Speed

Max Speed

pfx_x

pfx_z

FF

94.32

98.2

4.33

9.52

FT

93.72

96.5

9.05

6.95

CH

86.46

89.9

9.01

5.97

SL

81.44

85.0

-5.36

-0.61

CU

77.84

81.3

-2.38

-2.17

Pitch Results

Pitch#

Pitch%

Swing Rate

Whiff Rate

Wide Zone Rate

Zone Whiff Rate

Chase Rate

Watch Rate

FF

1585

44.6%

.447

.131

.522

.099

.260

.367

FT

599

16.9%

.476

.161

.571

.133

.207

.339

CH

663

18.7%

.623

.400

.555

.357

.288

.201

SL

596

16.8%

.483

.385

.466

.221

.434

.414

CU

110

3.1%

.155

.294

.536

.231

.235

.780

3553

99.9%

.482

.245

.528

.185

.287

.349

SLGCON

RSv/100

xRSv/100

FF

.474

0.68

-0.00

FT

.400

0.77

-0.20

CH

.350

3.10

1.94

SL

.692

0.03

1.38

CU

.429

0.10

0.32

.461

1.02

0.57

Count-Based

First

Ahead

Behind

Full

FF

46.2%

38.9%

54.1%

53.5%

FT

23.1%

14.2%

17.8%

5.7%

CH

11.9%

18.9%

21.7%

30.2%

SL

9.9%

26.8%

5.6%

10.7%

CU

8.9%

1.3%

0.7%

0.0%

Sabathia has a lot of confidence in his changeup, as evidenced by the high percentage of pitches in all counts. While groundballs are not really his forte, he got a ton of them off of his sinking fastball.

Like Sabathia, Beckett gets more grounders on the two-seamer, but sustained a higher overall groundball rate of just under 50%, well above the league average of ~43.5%. Though he did not miss as many bats as Sabathia did last year, he was able to make up for it with a lot of called strikes on the curveball.

BOTTOM LINE

I didn't really need to roll out all of these numbers to say that the first day of the regular season will feature a spectacular pitching matchup. It's always fun when two ace-type pitchers go head-to-head, and when one is on the Yankees and the other is on the Red Sox, it's even more fun. So on Sunday night, sit back, relax, and enjoy the beginning of what will surely be another spectacular season of baseball.

Gameday PITCHf/x data is from MLB Advanced Media; it can be easily accessed via this tool.